The hugely talented writer Nick Hornby must know a thing or two about what it feels like to have one’s book translated into film. Two of Hornby’s critically acclaimed novels – About a Boy and High Fidelity – have been made into movies, and no doubt the process involved some degree of anxiety and fear. It’s got to be hard, having someone else take your work of art and make it their own.

Perhaps his experience on the other side of the writer-screenwriter relationship had something to do with Hornby’s carfeul, tender film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s blockbuster memoir, Wild. The screenplay is fiercely loyal to Strayed’s original story: prismatic, emotionally dense, a swirl of flas...